Official LINGUIST List Blog

Author: Becca Morris

My name is Becca Morris and I am the Managing Editor here at LINGUIST List (LL) and I am also responsible for Finances, posting jobs, and creating social media boosts. We may have met via email, or you may remember my staff letter from last year.

It has been almost a year since I started at LINGUIST List and it has truly been a wonderful experience and opportunity. I am now a second year PhD student in Computational Linguistics at Indiana University and I would not have been able to continue if I hadn’t gotten my graduate assistantship job at LL – I came to IU as an out-of-state unfunded MA student. By employing graduate students The LINGUIST List is providing us the means to contribute to our field in an impactful way, while at the same time they are helping us tremendously.

Since my staff letter last year, I have become a second year PhD student and I am now working on Universal Dependencies and Dependency Parsing for Hakha Chin (as mentioned in my blog post) at IU. I am also minoring in Informatics. I expect to finish my qualifying exams by the end of Fall 2019 and then become a candidate. In my spare time, which there is not a lot of as a graduate student, I am teaching myself Swedish and would like to work with this language in the future.

I also like to go to concerts in the small amount of spare time that I have. Coheed and Cambria is my favorite band and this was my ninth time seeing them live.

LINGUIST List has not only allowed me to excel academically but also personally. This past year has been a rather transformative year for me and I don’t think I would have been able to do it had it not been for LL supporting me. I was able to find myself, personally and academically, this year and I will forever be grateful to The LINGUIST List for helping me along this journey.

Working at LL has taught me many things, for example, how to make valuable connections with notable people in our field and how to become better at time management and these are valuable skills that I will use throughout my career. This job also allows the editors and programmers to see what is going on in our field and provides us the opportunity to contribute to academia in a meaningful way.

LINGUIST List provides our field with vital resources and we couldn’t do it without your support. When you support The LINGUIST List you are not just supporting the editors and the programmers but also the linguistics community as a whole. Next year LL will turn 30 and we couldn’t have done it without your support.

Thank you again for all of your support, everyone here at LINGUIST List is forever grateful to all of you. If would like to help us to continue providing resources to the linguistic community please visit our fund drive page and donate.

The theme for this year’s Fund Drive is Language Documentation and Revitalization, because of this year’s theme, I would like to tell you about some of the work that I am involved with at Indiana University in addition to working at The LINGUIST List. I am a Computational Linguistics PhD student here at and as part of my work as a graduate student I am involved with a language documentation project: building documentary materials and computational tools for Hakha Chin. It should be noted that The LINGUIST List is not affiliated with this project, rather it is work that I am doing as a student while also working at The LINGUIST List.

Hakha Chin (Laiholh) is a language spoken in Myanmar/Burma with roughly 165,000 speakers, and there are more than 23,000 Burmese refugees who call Indiana home with nearly 17,000 residing in Indianapolis. Last year Hakha Chin was the language that was studied in the field methods classes taught by Dr. Kelly Berkson. Since there are not many resources available for Hakha Chin, the motivation behind this project is simple: having access to information in your native language is not a privilege, but a right. This motivation has lead to projects like using Mozilla Common Voice for Hakha Chin.

This is a screenshot of the Common Voice homepage illustrating the idea behind their system.

Mozilla Common Voice is a project whose aim is to “help make voice recognition open and accessible to everyone”. They do this by having users donate their voice and by listening to validate other submissions. Follow this link to see the page for Hakha Chin.

Here is a screenshot of what Common Voice looks like for Hakha Chin.

The Hakha Chin Common Voice Project has gotten very popular among the Hakha Chin speaking community. Mentions of this project have appeared on the Travel Myanmar YouTube channel and on the Chin Cable Network. Below you can see our very own Dr. Berkson discussing the work that is being done with Hakha Chin on the Travel Myanmar YouTube channel.

There is a lot of work revolving around Hakha Chin at IU at the moment, and there are multiple graduate students, myself included, working on this language. For example, I am working on creating a Universal Dependencies treebank so that I can work on Dependency Parsing for Hakha Chin.

To see some other cool things that are happening in the world of Language Revitalization and Documentation be sure to check back on our blog and social media pages, but most importantly, visit our Fund Drive page – it is here where you can learn more about us and make a donation. Thank you for your continued support.

Following this year’s Fund Drive theme we’re going to take a look at the movie Atlantis: The Lost Empire, an animated Disney movie from 2001. This movie was one of my all time favorites as a child, I even had a Barbie of the main character. In this movie Milo James Thatch, voiced by Micheal J. Fox, is a linguist and cartographer at the Smithsonian Institute. He believes that he can find The Shepherd’s Journal, which is an ancient manuscript that contains directions to Atlantis. It is safe to say that this movie is likely the first time I ever heard of linguistics and maybe watching this movie as much as I did primed me to be a linguist. Atlantis: The Lost Empire was briefly mentioned by our editor Sarah Robinson in her awesome ConLangs series here on our blog because this movie contains a ConLang: Atlantean.

This movie starts out with Atlantean dialogue with English subtitles, the scene is the destruction of the city and what the citizens do to preserve what they can of Atlantis resulting in it being hidden from the rest of the world. After the opening scene we see Milo, who while at work dwells in the boiler room (I feel like this is par for the course for a linguist, yeah?), describing a translation error of an Old Norse text. Milo is criticized for his research on Atlantean and is not taken seriously, which leads to him being hired to go on an expedition to find the city of Atlantis. The person who hires Milo exclaims that the crew is complete except that they need an expert in gibberish, aka Atlantean. Does this feel familiar anyone?

Here we see Milo, in his boiler room office, correcting his translation error about where The Shepherd’s Journal is located from ‘Ireland’ to ‘Iceland’. It turns out that it was located in Iceland.

Atlantean script is prevalent throughout the movie. Until the expedition crew gets to Atlantis, the script is mainly seen in The Shepherd’s Journal, which was found by the expedition crew on a previous expedition. Upon arriving in Atlantis, Milo discovers that Atlanteans can speak multiple languages and he hypothesizes that Atlantean must be based on a root dialect like The Tower of Babel. Milo explains the grammatical system of Atlantean by saying:

“…if you deconstruct Latin, you overlaid it with some Sumerian, throw in a dash of Thessalonian you’d be getting close to their grammatical structure.”

Here is Milo Thatch studiously looking over The Shepherd’s Journal.

It turns out that Milo is the only one who can read Atlantean because the knowledge of how to read Atlantean was lost in The Great Flood that ruined city. Milo helps the main Atlantean character Kida, voiced by Cree Summer, translate ancient Atlantean murals throughout the city to help return Atlantis to its former glory. Not only can Milo read and translate Atlantean, on the fly I might add, but he can also speak it. When speaking with Kida in Atlantean he asks how is accent is, which I’m sure every linguist reading this has done with a native speaker. The addition of this small detail was very much appreciated. For those interested, she said Milo’s accent was “boorish, provincial, and you speak it through your nose”.

The Atlantean language developed for this movie was created by Marc Okrand, who is also responsible for the creation of Klingon. Okrand created Atlantean by including a large inventory of Indo-European words and Atlantean can be described as being highly agglutinative. Inspiration for Atlantean was drwn from Sumerian and North American languages. Atlantean is based on historical reconstructions and is inspired by the fantasy of Atlantis: The Lost Empire. There are two main fictional principles surrounding the creation of the Atlantean language: Atlantean is intended to be a “Tower of Babel language”/”root dialect” of all languages, and Atlantean has existed without change since before 100,000 B.C., which is the First or Second age of Atlantis.

The writing system for Atlantean was created by John Emerson with the help of Marc Okrand and draws its inspiration from ancient alphabetical scripts, Semitic being the main inspiration. There is no capitalization or punctuation in Atlantean, and the character for ‘a’ was created with the intention of being a map of the city. Atlantean is also written using the boustrophedon writing system, so lines are written and read left to right for the first line, and then right to left for the following line, and then back to left to right, etc.

Here is the Atlantean alphabet with some IPA and their numerals.

Since Milo, mentioned the grammatical system of Atlantean I will also mention it briefly. The word order in Atlantean is strictly SOV. Adjectives and nouns that are of genitive case follow the nouns that they modify. Postpositions are the only type of adpositions present in Atlantean. Modal verbs follow the verbs they modify and also take on all personal and aspectual suffixes. In contrast, adverbs come before the verbs they modify. An interrogative particle is also utilized in Atlantean; however, the formation of questions does not affect the word order.

All-in-all, Milo can be chalked up to being considered one of the movie linguist archetypes. He seemed to be more of a translator than a linguist, but the film is still delightful and there were some additions, like the question of the accent that were appreciated as a linguist. Some of the things about Atlantean mentioned in this movie, like that the language has existed without change since 100,000 B.C. is very unrealistic even if this society has existed in isolation since 100,000 B.C. If you haven’t seen Atlantis: The Lost Empire I highly recommend it.

Here at The LINGUIST List we are dedicated to providing you, our readers and subscribers, with knowledge of all things linguistic. This year’s fund drive theme is geared towards discussing how our field is portrayed in media and pop-culture. Thanks to our donors and users we are able to continue to providing you all with information on all things linguistic. Please consider donating here to ensure that we can continue to provide this service to all of you. Thank you!